


A Book of Revelations

by InHisImage



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Drabble, Existential Crisis, Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Lucifer's Cage (Supernatural), POV Sam Winchester, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 01:20:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23866654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/InHisImage/pseuds/InHisImage
Summary: Post season 14 finale. Sam is questioning everything, from the point of every suffering he has ever endured to the validity of what Lucifer has been telling him in the cage. This is a stream of consciusness that follows a gruesome thought process where part of Sam finally understands where the devil is coming from.
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, Lucifer & Sam Winchester
Comments: 5
Kudos: 24





	A Book of Revelations

“So you see, Sam, God is not with you. He was never with you. It was always just… me.”

Trauma is a delicate irritable animal. Sly too, sneaky. It had once clawed Sam Winchester wide open and slipped in, inspected his insides with frantic eyes for somewhere hidden and dark, to settle, to nest. It’s not its fault really, that when it’s threatened, and it’s threatened easily and often, it would bounce up and scream, scratch at the inner walls of his skin, demanding out, and that his blood would boil and bubble in solidarity, and that his body would remember, reabsorb the damage, become it.

It’s such a mental thing to be so physical, and Sam digs a nail in the palm of his hand with vengeance, ruthless, sharp, makes it hurt; it doesn’t work that well anymore. And it’s funny that this is the version of PTSD that he can live with, the version where he doesn’t go insane or stick a gun to his head: the filtered, toned down PG-13 cut. And he’s still fucking devastated.

Lately he’s been poking the animal with a stick, gritting his teeth through the aftermath. He had once tried to choke it into submission, to bury it under piles and piles of everyday crap that doesn’t seem to mean jack today. But not now; now he wants to talk. Now he wants answers. Because he’s been bottle-fed lies as ultimate truths his entire life, and the conception he once had of himself is null and void. He thinks of the immense guilt he carries around like an open wound, his penance and his burden, and the Winchester family heirloom being _fight, fight, fight_ , and the whole world being more often than not his fucking responsibility to save and if there’s any point of it at all. And it feels like a punch in the guts and he’s sick, sick to his fucking stomach, that perhaps the devil has been right.

“You don’t understand how God loves, buddy.”

And if there was perhaps one thing that Lucifer loved more than to hear himself speak, it was to have someone there listen. Always a millinea-worth of words at the tip of his tongue waiting for an audience. How many hundreds of thousands of years alone in a cage that transcends the 4th dimention and renders time units moot before even an arch-bloody-angel is itching for a little pillow talk? Because he damn well looked like he was starving for it.

“You wouldn’t fathom how a creator, in all his majesty and might, could love the flawed products of his imagination. Always beneath him, always a failed project that could have been better, could have been more interesting. He claims to love you, huh, humans? He did love me once too. His love is not what it’s cracked up to be.”

And Sam would stare at him, see the bitterness drawn vivid on every wrinkle, on the furrowed eyebrows and the distracted glances. He’d see it all and he wouldn’t buy it. Difficult to buy any of it, when the devil changed faces in a blink. And what might have registered, for the briefest of seconds, as something human, something to study, and dissect, maybe even relate to, would be shed and discarded, snuffed before it blooms. And just like that, he’s all playful mischievous grins and quick flashes of electric red in glowing eyes again. It is, perhaps retrospectively, almost as if the truth he was selling wasn’t worth the wasted energy. He had probably been there and done that a thousand times over. And Lucifer is powerful, and prideful, and could instill terror so terrible, so otherworldly, in your heart, and you’d still watch him sweet-talk a mother into selling her first born on a whim with one-tenth of the charm you know him capable of. And Sam knew this, saw it first hand through the very eyes they have once shared, and so he would guard himself, would tell himself that if he were sentenced to an eternity with the prince of lies, he better not start gorging on the bullshit.

Somehow though, the exact same “bullshit” did bear repeating. Lucifer must have whispered it a thousand times more.

“Doesn’t matter if in a cage in literal Hell or on a populated green planet; we are pawns and we play our parts. Dad needed a villain and a tragic hero, a leap of faith and a final sacrifice. It’s his whole spiel. And it’s your and my only inherent value to a creator, or else we’re boring, disappointing, and a disappointed God is not above killing his darlings.”

Lucifer didn’t want to play. Lucifer wanted to walk off the battlefield. Lucifer just wanted to sweep the chess board clean. He also wanted to end the world out of spite alone.

But what Sam remembers so intensely, what was burnt into his temporal lope as well as soul in equal measures, are the resentment and the fury that went both ways after he swan-dived them all into the pit, how he was made into the punching bag, the scapegoat, the embodiment of every failure that has ever befallen Heaven since God cut the ribbon on its grand opening and then upped and left, and how he held onto his sacrifice through it all, derived some sort of life-force from how noble, significant, it has all been. Because if he didn’t have his redemption, if he hasn’t just saved the world, what was left for him now, other than the gore and the suffering and the blood and the mind games, for all of eternity to come? He had wanted Lucifer to be wrong so much, so much. Didn’t allow himself an inkling of doubt, clung to his chosen narrative like a drowning child. It had kept him sane. It had kept him sane.

But, hey, Sammy, maybe you were just a complete fucking fool. Just your average drug junkie prodigal son, wrapped up head to toe in bad choices and delusions of grandeur. Ever think of that? Ever think maybe your daddy has fucked you up so extraordinarily you are so desperate to prove yourself worthy of free will and agency? Ever think maybe your brother has loved you so profoundly you are so desperate to prove yourself worthy of atonement and salvation? Ever think it was all meant to be?

Sam scoffs, and the bunker is eerily quiet tonight he can almost hear it echo. There’s a dreamscape blurry quality to his vision that reminds him so acutely of Hell, where reality was warped and manipulated too and he couldn’t see past the illusion if he tried. And it’s a little hilarious, in hindsight, how fucking black and white it has been back in the cage. Back when faith armed and shielded him, and the pain grounded him, and when he could, on the oftentimes surprisingly civil exchanges where Lucifer indulged his verbal abuse with little to no serious consequences, look the devil in the eye and tell him to take his lies and stick’em where the sun don’t shine.

And not that any part of him is willing, or able, to justify the slightest sense of empathy or rapport for or with Lucifer. And sure, the son of a bitch is dead and gone, and sure, the mere mention of his name still triggers raw ugly anxiety that shoots through his nervous system like searing hot bullets. But if Sam could muster the capacity for objective judgment, or could choose to dismiss memories that still have him twist and turn, drenched in sweat, in his sleep on the regular, he’d be wondering. About the angel that fell from grace, that was once God’s favorite, being literally branded with the pure matter that constitutes corruption, cast out of heaven at the first sign of rebellion, banished, locked up, isolated, antagonized. Every ingredient thrown in there with flair. To say that the devil had a fair chance at being anything but is at least a little unfair.

And Sam’s head reels. Because he despises him so much, so much, with ferocity that still burns through his chest like acid, but he can also understand the boiling hatred, the alienation, the jealousy, the abject betrayal and the utterly blindsiding abandonment that could take a petulant child half-deity and morph him into an attack-sensitive monster, always a provocation away from snapping an entire continent into non-existence. And Sam looks at his life and all he sees is Azazel, dripping that same poison of power and corruption between the parted lips of a 6-month-old infant. He sees the machinery at work, the grooming, the indoctrination, the crushed look on his face when his father told him that if he were to go, he should never come back, and it’s not like Sam’s road to Hell hasn’t been paved smooth with good intentions. And it’s not like he’s Lucifer’s perfect vessel for biological reasons alone.

It’s brutal, his entire fucking life, nothing but sand castles stomped flat to the ground. Every time. Every single build, and Sam is just so goddamn _drained_. There can’t be an ascribed meaning or morality to good and evil when they’ve both been so meticulously orchestrated. Just as much, there’s no substance or validity to harboring grudges, to pointing fingers, to granting forgiveness. And Sam wonders if there was ever a line where the omnipotent all-knowing hand of God ends and free choice, autonomy, accountability begin. And if so, where? And it’s not like he’d still have his high horse to ride in on if Dean wasn’t always there, keeping him straight, keeping the darkness the fuck out.

He thinks of Dean, of long peaceful road trips in the Impala. Classic rock playing on the radio, and the people they’ve saved. The codependency and the irrationality of a love that is all they ever had. Small victories that amount to nothing in the greater scheme of things, and, yet, someone who would sell his soul for him, die for him, charge into hell with all guns blazing to save him.

Dean is perhaps the one truth he clings to for dear life and will hopefully take to the grave.

And, hey, Sammy, it was all for naught. A+ on character development, D- on theology. But now you know. And so you grab your brother by the shoulder and you go do what you do. You find a way, and you fight.


End file.
